Features of Authoring Tools Lecture 14 By Razia Nisar Noorani

Features of multimedia authoring tools Editing features Organizing features Programming features Interactive features Performance tuning features Playback features Delivery features Cross-Platform features Internet Playability

Editing features The elements of multimedia – image, animation, text, digital audio and MIDI music and video clips need to be created, edited and converted to standard file formats and the specialized applications provide these capabilities. Editing tools for these elements, particularly text and still images are often included in your authoring system.

Organizing features The organization, design and production process for multimedia involves storyboarding and flowcharting. Some authoring tools provide a visual flowcharting system or overview facility for illustrating your project’s structure at a macro level. Storyboards or navigation diagrams too can help organize a project. Because designing the interactivity and navigation flow of you project often requires a great deal of planning and programming effort, your story board should describe not just graphics of each screen but the interactive elements as well. Features that help organize your material, such as those provided by Super Edit, Authorware, IconAuthor and other authoring systems, are a plus.

Programming features Authoring tools that offer a very high level language or interpreted scripting environment for navigation control and for enabling user inputs – such as Macromedia Director, Macromedia Flash, HyperCard, MetaCard and ToolBook are more powerful. The more commands and functions provided in the scripting language, the more powerful the authoring system.

Interactivity features Interactivity empowers the end users of your project by letting them control the content and flow of information. Authoring tools should provide one or more levels of interactivity: Simple branching , which offers the ability to go to another section of the multimedia production. Conditional branching , which supports a go-to based on the result of IF-THEN decision or events. A structured language that supports complex programming logic, such as nested IF-THENs, subroutines, event tracking and message passing among objects and elements.

Performance tuning features Complex multimedia projects require extra synchronization of events. Accomplishing synchronization is difficult because performance varies widely among the different computers used for multimedia development and delivery. Some authoring tools allow you to lock a production’s playback speed to specified computer platform, but other provides no ability what so ever to control performance on various systems.

Playback features When you are developing multimedia project, your will continually assembling elements and testing to see how the assembly looks and performs. Your authoring system should let you build a segment or part of your project and then quickly test it as if the user were actually using it.

Delivery features Delivering your project may require building a run-time version of the project using the multimedia authoring software. A run-time version allows your project to play back with out requiring the full authoring software and all its tools and editors. Many times the run time version does not allow user to access or change the content, structure and programming of the project. If you are going to distribute your project widely, you should distribute it in the run-time version.

Cross-Platform features It is also increasingly important to use tools that make transfer across platforms easy. For many developers, the Macintosh remains the multimedia authoring platform of choice, but 80% of that developer’s target market may be Windows platforms. If you develop on a Macintosh, look for tools that provide a compatible authoring system for Windows or offer a run-time player for the other platform.

Internet Playability Due to the Web has become a significant delivery medium for multimedia, authoring systems typically provide a means to convert their output so that it can be delivered within the context of HTML or DHTML, either with special plug-in or embedding Java, JavaScript or other code structures in the HTML document.